The Totalitarian State

Extract

A few years ago the word totalitarian was unknown. The popular use of the term has its origin in Mussolini's famous article on the Fascistic doctrine. Mussolini probably took the expression totalitarian from Hegel's Philosophy of Law, where the word is used to characterize the organic unity of the people. “Liberalism,” wrote Mussolini, “negates the state in the interest of the single individual. Fascism affirms the state as the true reality of the individual. It is for the only freedom which can seriously be considered—the freedom of the state and of the individual within the state—because for the Fascist everything is in the state, and outside of the state nothing legal or spiritual can exist or still less be of value. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.”